Page 35 of Waiting for You

What guarantee did I have that she wouldn't break me again?

I clamped my mouth shut.

We sat suspended in the freezing silence.

My brain betrayed me, flooding my vision with memories. Our chaotic first date. The outfit she wore the first time she laughed at my terrible joke, the moment I knew I was in irreversible trouble. The rainy afternoon in my beat-up car when I finally told her I loved her, and the breathless pause before she whispered it back. The overcast morning the courier dropped off her package, the sickening thickness of the envelope, the certainty that I was about to be destroyed before I even broke the seal.

I pushed myself off the cold stone.

"I'm going to head back inside," I said.

She looked up at me, her face lost in the dark. "Okay."

I turned and walked back through the grand foyer. The empty corridors echoed with my footsteps, the oil paintings staring down at me, and I didn't stop until I reached my suite. Eliza was asleep, her breathing a rhythmic hum, her features slack in the dim light. I stood in the doorway and watched her chest rise and fall.

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the velvet case.

I held the box in my palm.

I knew Eliza. I understood her corporate reliability, her steadiness, the professional sacrifice she'd just made to show up for a wedding she'd mostly missed. I knew for a fact that Eliza had never handed me an envelope that took years to recover from. I understood the safety of building a life with someone who simply did not leave.

I shoved the velvet case back into the pocket, crossed the carpet to the reading chair by the window, and dropped into it.

Sloane Ty was never going to be the safe choice. Whatever chemistry still burned between us, the question of her loyalty stayed unanswered, and my heart wasn't built to survive that kind of exposure a second time. Eliza was here. The stable life I'd built was here. That was my reality, and I was going to start treating it that way.

NINE

SLOANE

I sat alone in the suffocating quiet.

I hadn't moved from that spot since I came back from the front steps, the suite pitched in darkness around me. The distant sounds of the mansion dissolved into nothing as the last stragglers from the reception found their beds. I stayed stranded in the dead center of that silence, my mind looping around the single loaded question he'd dared to ask me.

Did you ever regret it?

I'd confessed that I did. I handed him the truth because I was exhausted from carrying that secret alone. But sitting here with the midnight air pressing against my chest, I replayed the whole evening, and the pieces refused to form a logical picture.

The sapphire ring had been tucked inside his jacket through everything. It had witnessed the ceremony, the raucous reception, the claustrophobic cellar, our raw conversation on the steps. It had been riding in his pocket while he caged me against the wooden racks, his lips hovering close to my ear as he asked if I could feel his sincerity, a flirtatious current pulsing under it that neither of us moved to shut down.

He'd packed that velvet box on purpose. He'd smuggled it into his suit pocket and traveled all this way, and there was no version of that behavior that ended in a platonic friendship. The ring was riding in his jacket because he wanted me to stumble onto it. He was quietly handing me an ultimatum, stepping back into the shadows to see if I had the courage to fight for him, because that was who Xavier Paige was at his core.

If you want this love, it's right here waiting for you.

But I had to be the one to close the gap.

The years had shifted our reality. My tyrannical father had been the sole architect of our original wreckage, forcing a breakup I never chose. He'd handed me that horrific ultimatum like a royal decree, and I'd bent the knee because I was a terrified twenty-one-year-old and he knew which triggers to press to break me. Xavier had been a surgical resident back then, a defenseless target my father could've ruined with one phone call, and I'd believed the monster when he swore he'd burn Xavier's future to the ground. I surrendered because I was paralyzed by fear, and because fearful obedience was the only survival strategy I'd ever known under that roof.

But I'd been building my own empire for years.

I'd built a successful tattoo studio from nothing. I'd secured my own financial freedom. I'd thrown out my father's name, his expectations, his specific brand of warfare, wearing his influence down until standing in a room with him no longer locked my shoulders up in terror. Xavier wasn't a defenseless resident anymore either. He ran a medical network across four states, a man my father couldn't threaten because the footing had shifted for good. There was no leverage my father could hold over either of us now.

Xavier had been right during our dance. I'd bolted the second things got difficult, and I'd wasted eight years calling that cowardice a noble choice when it was raw terror wearing the expensive clothes of a decision.

I wasn't that helpless twenty-one-year-old anymore, and I was done running from the only man who mattered.

I shoved my feet back into my shoes and marched out the door.

The corridor was deserted, the estate wrapped in a cathedral stillness. I counted the brass room numbers on the mahogany walls until I found his suite. I lifted my shaking hand and knocked.